Program Events

Yearly Events

Faculty and StudentsThere are a number of occasions during the year where Philosophy faculty meet with students, sometimes just to socialize, other times for such specific purposes as the following:

meeting with prospective majors to talk about Moderation;

meeting with Junior majors to discuss the senior project process;

meeting with majors to discuss the vicissitudes of applying to graduate school.

Senior Project ConferenceEach spring semester, the program holds a Senior Project conference at which seniors present their work in panels of three or four students, moderated byi Junior majors and followed by questions from the audience.

Philosophy Speaker Series The program hosts a Philosophy Speaker Series, with three or four philosophers each seminar invited to talk about their work.

Current and Upcoming Events

Race and Animals: Reflections on a Contested Comparison

Monday, April 9, 2018

Alice Crary, Professor of PhilosophyThe New School for Social Research

Comments on a Contested Comparison: Animals and Race

Monday, April 9, 2018

Alice Crary, Professor of PhilosophyNew School/Oxford

Many animal activists have, over the past four decades, compared the utterly callous treatment of animals in modern industrial societies to the treatment of the Nazis’ human victims in the Holocaust. The activists who avail themselves of these comparisons do so with an eye to impressing on us that the utterly callous “processing” of billions of animals in settings such as, e.g., confined feeding operations, industrial slaughterhouses, aquafarms, and laboratories resembles the Holocaust in its momentousness and horror. This lecture contains a nuanced discussion of this strategy, starting with a criticism of animal activists’ use of Holocaust likenesses that is grounded in an account of ways in which invidious comparisons to animals have historically figured in specific methods of racist domination. The lecture’s main negative claim is that, in light of the relevant histories and their contemporary aftereffects, the strategy of referring to the Holocaust to expose wrongs to animals is objectionable. The positive emphasis of the lecture is on showing that it doesn’t follow that we need to abandon the concerns that originally led some animal activists to invoke the idea of the Holocaust and, further, that we can understand the impulse driving these individuals (even if we don’t agree with them) if we follow up on the work of authors who try to impart a sense of the kinds of challenges we face in trying to bring the worldly lives of animals, as well as the wrongs inflicted on them by human beings, into focus in a manner relevant to ethics.
Time: 5:30 pmLocation: Olin, Room 203Contact: Jay ElliottE-mail: jelliott@bard.eduPhone: 845-758-6822

Reducing Two-Way Powers

Tuesday, April 24, 2018

Andrei Buckareff

Some philosophers argue that if exercising intentional agency is understood in terms of settling truths, then the power required for the exercise of agency is an ontologically irreducible two-way power to either make it true that p ormake it true that not-p. In this paper, I motivate rejecting two-way powers by, first, arguing that accepting irreducible two-way powers into one’s metaphysic of agency implies an ontological commitment to substance dualism. I then offer an ontologically less costly alternative to irreducible two-way powers. I argue that an ontologically reductive account of two-way powers should be accepted. The reductive account can provide us with the truth makers for talk about two-way powers.